How to Track Website Changes

for Competitor Insights

by Monica

Long gone are the days of haphazard manual checks on your competitors’ website hoping to spot the difference! Been there, done that. There are smarter ways that businesses can use to monitor for web site changes at scale.

Here is an easy 4-steps strategy guide to track website changes efficiently and get the most out of it!

1 – Set up an automatic page monitor for any website

Whether you are a CEO, Marketing Director, Webmaster or PR professional, staying up to date with the way competitors present themselves online is absolutely crucial to staying relevant in the market.

These days, businesses continually test new layouts, branding, pricing strategies and aim to build conversion into the design of their websites. For many, their websites are the facades of their businesses. Most larger organizations add new content or optimize existing content weekly, if not daily. Even small updates tell a story and, if you’ve been trying to find them by scanning the page, in most cases you haven’t found all of them. To get the edge over your competitors, you should track website changes on their domains on a regular basis and use these learnings to craft your ideal strategic moves.

2 – Get email alerts when visual changes on competitor websites occur

Staying consistent in tracking websites changes is key when your business operates in a dynamic and competitive market. Be the first to know about new developments on the websites of your competitors by setting up email alerts about large changes and minor adjustments as they happen.

Automating a page monitor that sends you alerts about any new activity on other websites gives you time to react.

Alerts also act as catalysts for your team to explore what your competition has introduced and inform your collective decision-making. Responding to alerts only when a change has occurred saves you precious time that you can put towards other activities in your business.

3 – Keep an archive of your competitors’ visual website history

Collect screenshots of your competitors’ websites to build a timeline of visual changes your competitors have implemented. Track the evolution of colours, positioning of elements, special offers and more. The upkeep of this archive can help embed visual data collection into the DNA of your organization and provides a vital tool for decision-making.

In the future, you can use the archive as an asset to your business in a number of ways:

Use it to further knowledge-sharing among your marketing, design or IT team

Use as a reference for the purposes of onboarding new hires

Refer to it as a resource in decision-making

Monitor web site change when a competitor copies elements from your website

4 – Capture insights about the narratives your competitors are telling and compare with your own

Intel about the way your competitors are telling stories about their businesses online can help you make decisions about your own web presence. Hooking up a page monitor for visual changes to your own website can also help your team keep track of the various stages your business website has gone through.

Compare your KPIs with the visual updates you have made on your website to optimize your homepage for conversion. Use these collections to test your business longside your competitors with focus groups to test the clarity of your image in comparison to theirs.

Implementing powerful, automated webpage monitoring can have significant impact on your business. Staying on top of new visual data about your competitors’ moves and efficiently managing visual changes on your own website can make or break your company’s future strategy. Any business can make use of tools like Pagescreen to monitor web page change on your competitors’ websites and bring competitor insights into your team’s decision-making on the day-to-day.

Takeways

Keep ahead of the curve by applying a tool that will effectively keep an archive of your competitors’ visual changes ;

Make sure you get alerted about new adjustments ;

Build a dashboard of insights about the narratives your competition is telling through their websites.

Get set up for free in minutes with Pagescreen and save hours tracking down your competition’s last move on the web.

Pagescreen is a simple platform to capture and archive visual copies of web pages. With our screenshot automation & change detection technologies, it has never been easier to monitor your competitors' websites, to build and collect intelligence.